Proposed power line would run from New England through New York

By John Burgeson, Staff writer

Published
5:44 pm EST, Saturday, February 27, 2010

BRIDGEPORT ---- An Ontario-based company has announced plans for a major $3.8 billion, 355-mile transmission line that would link New York City and southern New England with Canadian hydroelectric and wind power sources. The line would be installed mostly under major bodies of water, including Lake Champlain, the Hudson River and Long Island Sound, terminating in Bridgeport.

The company behind the project is Transmission Developers Inc., also known as TDI.

Save the Sound, the environmental group that successfully fought the proposed Broadwater liquified natural gas pipeline in 2008, said it will meet with TDI next week before deciding on whether to oppose this idea, too.

"We haven't seen any of the details yet so we can't say how we would think about the project just yet," said Leah Schmalz, Save the Sound's director of legislative and legal affairs. "We're looking forward to sitting down with developers to hear how they chose the path that they've chosen."

TDI said that the 2,000-megawatt line would be less than 6 inches in diameter. One megawatt can supply about 1,000 homes with electricity, so this line could, in theory, could supply about 2 million homes. There are about 1.5 million homes in Connecticut, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Unlike most high-voltage transmission lines, it would use direct current instead of alternating current, so as not to generate possibly harmful electromagnetic fields, often referred to as EMF radiation.

The power would primarily come from new hydropower and wind generation projects being developed in Canada, TDI said.

At the line's termination in Bridgeport, a converter station would be built to change the direct current to alternating current,

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One of the company's high-voltage, direct-current cables is already in place under the sound, between the Long Island town of Shoreham, N.Y., and Norwalk. Others are in place between the United Kingdom and France, and between Italy and Greece, and several other places around the world.

"We see ourselves as building part of America's new super-transmission highway," said Donald Jessome, president and CEO of TDI, in a prepared statement.

TDI said that it hopes to complete the line by 2015.

"There's been no permit filing made here with our department as yet," said Phil Dukes, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Utility Control. He added that DPUC officials have sat down with TDI planners to go over the project.

"There are a lot of proposals to bring power to the region, which is likely to result in lower-cost power to Connecticut," Dukes said. "But a lot of these projects are a long way to coming to fruition."

The line would almost completely avoid the use of overhead power lines. It would mostly be buried under water beds, using a water jet as a trench-digging device, which the company said has a minimal impact on the environment.

The trench would be only a few inches wider that the cable itself, and it would be about 3 feet deep. TDI said that after the cable is buried, it's almost impossible to tell where it's located.

Still, part of the line's route in the bed of the Hudson River would skirt the part of the river near Albany, so as not to disturb buried PCB sediment there.

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